SCI-BUS

SCI-BUS will create a generic-purpose gateway technology as a toolset to provide seamless access to major computing, data and networking infrastructures and services in Europe including clusters, supercomputers, grids, desktop grids, academic and commercial clouds. SCI-BUS will elaborate an application-specific gateway building technology and customisation methodology based on which user communities can easily develop their own customised gateways. SCI-BUS will use the gateway technology and customization methodology to create 11 application-specific gateways customized for various types of user communities (represented in the project) and to provide gateway services for these communities including astrophysics, seismology, helio-physics, bio-science, computational chemistry, biomedical communities, PireGrid SMEs. community, Blender community, citizens web-2 community (Electonic Document Gateway), DCI application developer community, business process modeling community. SCI-BUS will establish production gateway services for the represented user communities and will attract further user communities by training and by other forms of disseminations activities. SCI-BUS will use the established production customized gateways as best-practice case studies based on which other communities can build their own customized gateway. SCI-BUS will provide gateway development, operation and maintenance support for the new communities to build and operate their own customized gateways. SCI-BUS will provide user support for application developers and end-users to develop and run new DCI applications based on the developed gateways. SCI-BUS will develop business models to enable the commercial exploitation of the developed technologies and to guarantee the sustainability of the gateway services developed in the project.

E-Group is developing in this project the so called “Electronic Document Gateway”:

The Electronic Document Handling Gateway supports different types of document processing in the business and governmental area. Certain processing steps (data analysis, transformation) are computation-oriented, therefore in the background some kind of grid or cloud support is needed.

One of the cases where applying electronic signature technology is legally allowed (converting paper into authentic electronic documents) became a hot topic in the last 2 years (in the period of economic crisis), because it can immediately save money for the companies, organizations. This process could be supported by the “Electronic document handling gateway” which is based on previous researches “Web2Grid community gateway”. By converting paper-based documents into electronic formats (e.g. by scanners), attaching metadata information to them and creating electronic signature on these packages the following benefits arise:

immediately make an end of hiring warehouses for storing paper-based documents, because those can be eliminated, shredded;

the retrieval of electronic documents becomes much more faster which saves time and also money;

these documents can be sent directly to government (no need to print them out again and sign them by hand) because electronic signature ensures integrity and authenticity of documents;

reuse of documents (e.g. copy-paste “OCR-ized” texts) becomes available at if they are needed for further works.

These projects really shows that the operation of a paper-less office is much more cost-effective, but the way to get this status is a bit more difficult than it seems to be.

The legal background (Decree No. 13/2005. (X. 27.) of the Minister of Information and Communications on the Rules of Digitalization of Paper-based Documents) describes the guidelines of the process and also a technical specification about metadata structure has been published according to this regulation.